When Myanmar’s military seized power in 2021, the state did not simply change hands. In many places it lost its grip on the ordinary work of public life. Doctors, reporters, and aid workers kept that work going by other means, carried by wider networks of trust and mutual obligation that the regime could neither command nor see.
This volume calls that practice fugitive professionalism: expertise that slips the state’s hold without abandoning the work itself. Drawing on fieldwork from across post-coup Myanmar and its borderlands, the chapters follow how people sustained everything from protection against explosive ordnance to healthcare, money, journalism, education, and poetry once formal institutions failed them. The editor’s introduction sets these accounts against the long contrast between the centralizing mandala of the lowlands and the upland traditions of governing without a center, and argues that what looks like improvisation is the reactivation of long-standing traditions of reciprocal care, from funeral societies to parahita welfare groups, carried at new speed by the digital networks every chapter runs on.
The result is a study of how a society holds itself together when its center falls away, and of what that holding might mean for the country’s federal future.
- THEME
- Mobility and Border